Let's build a playground-oh no wait let's just prep the wood for the framing

Most regular readers of my blog know I am a fan of "Tiny House Nation" on the FYI Network.  What you may not know is I love a lot of the shows that do a lot of creative things on houses and yards and buildings in general.  Things like "Home Town", "Fixer Upper", "Rehab Addict"  any of the flipper or crasher programs on DIY and HGTV network.  It started a long time ago with "This Old House" on PBS.  I liked shows that show more of the work and what it takes to make something.  I especially like a show that is more realistic in their time frames.  I hate it when a show pours concrete and then pretends to build on it the next day.  If they actually do that, I don't care what special additives they use they are causing problems down the road if not sooner.  Concrete cures over time.  If you properly cure concrete for 7 days it will be 50% stronger than if you don't.  AS important is the fact that the concrete will release moisture for up to 30 days with 21 days being the time frame for most of the moisture release.

So why is this important?  Because I am preparing to help the mission team from the states build a couple of playground items, the biggest being a high energy activity center that was funded through our wish list last year.  I wanted to write a wonderful blog about putting up all the framework and having it ready for the team when they come all set in concrete.  Only it takes a long time to do things here and prepping the wood is no exception, so I decided to give you a first-hand look at the long time frame in building something like this.

So last weekend I bought 8 each 2x6 boards because they don't sell 4x4 posts here.  It is 2x6 or 1x8 boards you can buy.  Anything you want to build has to be made out of those.  So the activity center has a climbing wall on one side and a slide on the other with a platform between the two so I can build monkey bars underneath and they are out of direct sunlight.

The boards after I unload them from the truck.  You can see they are fairly raw.

The platform that the climbing wall and slide attach to is going to be at least 6 feet in the air.  I would love for it to be longer but the boards which are normally 18 feet long were actually only about 16 feet of good lumber with a few exceptions.  I have to cut them before I can load them on the truck and normally just cut them in half.  Due to this, I modified the size down to 6 feet so I can still get a solid 2 feet in the ground.

While a 2x6 board can support the weight of what I am building it is considered slender by most structural support criteria.  I could brace it but that would cut off the monkey bar idea completely.  So instead I am going to "sister" 2 of them together to create a 4x6 post.

Before I can do any of this I have to get the boards ready.  From the picture above you can see I have some parts that have to be cut off but they are also very rough on the exterior with cut marks and bark still visible in areas.

This is a closeup of the surface of the wood.  If you are a professional woodworker you may buy your lumber raw from the mill like this to save cost.  Here this is what they consider end user lumber like you would buy at a home improvement store.

So a planing I go.  Thanks to Mauldin United Methodist Men's Fellowship I have an electric planer that you operate by hand.  This is much better than a non-electric hand planer trust me.  It is not a table top planer you see on those shows I mentioned earlier though.  

Sorry, this was a little out of focus but that line you see on the wood is actually a 1/8" difference in the depth of the wood that has to be planed off completely.

a planed board surface next to one that is not

All in all the 16 halves of 2x6 lumber took close to 37 hours of 3 1/2 days to plane down to a fairly smooth and squared up the surface.  The next thing I have to do is check the length of good lumber on each board and separate them into piles.

Now comes the fun part on day 5.  Making the posts.  You start by laying out the wood and choosing the pieces that will benefit the most out of being sistered together.  This process can help get some of the warp out of the wood if they are slightly opposite.  If they are largely warped you need to forget working it out in this step and do it over the weekend I will show you later.

You then put on a coat of glue using wood glue.  They have two types of wood glue here.  One type that expands and makes a big mess but then drys out and loses all adhesion.  The other looks and acts like school glue and manages to maintain adhesion for about a year with their dry seasons.  So the glue is not your only method of connecting the two.

Next you clamp them together and then nail them together.  Now a quick tip about working with nails of the 3 and 4" variety in places like Africa and South America-they will come slightly bent or with no head or just generally weak.  So the best way to do this is pre-drill a hole for the nails about 1/2" deep with a bit just smaller than the nail and set them up down the line.  It makes them easier to drive in and less risk to your thumb with nails that have a bad head that breaks.

I do a pattern basically like a zig zag stitch.  Some helpful tips.  If you are going to use bolts to attach a beam to your posts like I am, then place nails in the first inch of wood and then the next one at least as far away as the depth of your beam in this case 6".  The next tip if you are cutting your boards after you sister them up then make sure you mark where you will cut to make sure not to put a nail where you may be sawing.

The final stage is to stack wood on top of any pieces not yet straight to take the warp out of them.  The one on the left is the one with a slight twist to the boards that I could not get out with the planer.  I will leave them to sit over the weekend while I go to town and buy more lumber for the next stage.

Next week I will set these posts in concrete so they will be ready for the team to build the rest of the project on them.  While the concrete cures I will be prepping the rest of the lumber for this project and others so they will be able to put them all together.